The Flash Review: When Harry Met Harry… (Season 4 Episode 6)

“When Harry Met Harry…” is The Flash Season 4’s first real letdown.

To be fair, it’s still better than several Season 3 installments. But it’s the worst episode of this season to date, thanks to some goofy storytelling and the pervasive sense that it’s trying too hard.

It’s not as funny as it wants viewers to think it is. The metahuman of the week is generally boring and forgettable. Pretty much only the last five minutes matter.

“When Harry Met Harry…” is a great example of when Season 4’s amped-up light and breezy tone doesn’t work. The episode veers too close to preachy instead of fun, and while several characters learn Very Important Lessons at the end, these moments feel predictable and unearned.

Unfortunately, even a fight with a giant animated T-Rex skeleton can only make up for so much.

The bulk of the hour focuses on what is essentially Barry Allen’s Superhero Training School, as he attempts to help Elongated Man Ralph Dibney figure out how to use his new metahuman powers for good.

The jokes that fly are occasionally fun, but the central gimmick — can Ralph learn to put helping innocent people first? — gets pretty old real quick.

Happily, Barry is at his most likable when he’s going on about goodness and why we should choose it, so that helps. The real problem is that Ralph is frustratingly one-note, and that note is kind of sketchy.

We already know from his first two appearances on The Flash that Dibney has a complicated, messy background. As an “ends justifies the means” kind of person, he seems to have plenty of moral flexibility about doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

His character is much less of an obvious good guy than most folks who join up with Team Flash (Killer Frost excepted, obviously). That’s a generally a positive. Barry and company need differing perspectives at Star Labs.

The downside, however, is that Ralph is also kind of a jerk.

He’s rude and crass and disrespectful to almost everyone, and while I’m all for the idea of the “lovable loser,” there’s way too much emphasis on the loser here so far.

Additionally, in our current cultural environment, it seems worth saying: Ralph’s rampant misogyny is crazy off-putting. His insistence on referring to women — even and especially Caitlin — by their measurements instead of their names is just so sexist and gross.

Fortunately, by the end of the episode, it seems as though The Flash is trying to put Ralph on the road to some sort of redemption.

His heart-to-heart with Barry about how difficult it is to care about everything when he’s not used to caring about anything is very good. It’s a necessary reckoning we probably all need to see if he’s going to be any kind of hero.

Sure, this sequence has all the subtlety of a D.A.R.E video from the 1980s, but Grant Gustin and Hartley Sawyer sell the heck out of it. In fact, it’s probably the first time I’ve genuinely liked anything about Ralph at all.

By the end of the episode, Dibney is making balloon-style animals out of his stretchy appendages for an injured little girl. As a metaphor for Ralph’s newfound understanding of how his actions can impact others, it’s pretty clunky.

But at least it’s sweet rather than crude, and that has to count for something.

Elsewhere, the hunt for The Thinker (known only as “DeVoe,” at this point) kicks into high gear. In doing so, The Flash provides a great gift for those of us who maybe feel that Season 4 lacks a bit in the Harrison Wells department.

In an attempt to figure out the identity of their new nemesis, Harry puts together a crew of the smartest people he knows: various versions of himself. It’s a great use of the “multiple Wells” gag from last season, only without the threat of getting stuck with another H.R.

Unfortunately, we only get to spend time with three additional Wellses this week, rather than the dozens some of us (read: me) might prefer. But between the German Wells from Earth-12, the Hugh Hefner-esque Wells from Earth-47, and the Mad Max: Fury Road-style Wells from Earth-22, there’s still a lot to enjoy.

True, these scenes aren’t subtle. The Wolfgang Wells is basically “Sprockets” from the old Mike Myers SNL sketch, and “Lothario” is an extended Matthew McConaughey impression.

Given how many layers Harry has, it would be good to see other versions of him that are more human and less caricature. However, the difference between these scenes and the Dibney plot is that at least the Council of Wells is funny.

Harry also gets a lesson in self-worth this week, in the form of a pep talk from Cisco. This lands less clunkily than Barry and Ralph’s similar conversation, because Cisco and Harry already have a real friendship.

Harry’s crisis of self works because we already care about the character. We know that, underneath it all, he’s a good man who cares about others. So when Cisco has to remind him to care about himself too, it means something to us, as viewers.

Maybe Ralph will someday too. But today is not that day.

Stray thoughts:

• It’s unfortunate that after last week’s great girl-power focused episode The Flash barely even manages to give Iris or Caitlin any lines this week, let alone a subplot of their own. Siiiigh.
• Frankly, I’d rather watch an episode about Killer Frost at Burning Man than most of what we got in this one.
• Dibney’s Elongated Man costume is so genuinely terrible, and I kind of love that fact. I want it to be terrible because, at the moment, he deserves it.
• I don’t know about you guys, but I certainly wanted Wells the Grey to stick around.
• That weird Microsoft Surface ad that masqueraded as part of the show was just so very unnecessary.
• Caitlin’s most consequential scene being the Microsoft ad kind of sums up everything that’s wrong with this episode.
• Are we supposed to assume Clifford DeVoe can’t be a supervillain because he’s in a wheelchair? Please don’t go down that road, show.

What did you think of this episode of The Flash? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

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The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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